Running HIPAA Compliant Containers on AWS Just Got A Lot Cheaper

Running HIPAA Compliant Containers on AWS Just Got A Lot Cheaper

Amazon Web Services has announced significant price reductions to AWS Fargate, one of Amazon’s cloud container service. Amazon’s recent January 7th announcement, reduces the price for AWS Fargate by 20% for vCPU and 65% for memory across all regions where Fargate is currently available.

About AWS Fargate

AWS Fargate is a compute engine for Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) that allows AWS customers to run containers without having to manage servers or clusters. This service allows clients host containerized applications with minimal overhead and administration on AWS. Fargate is used by thousands of customers to run containers and containerized applications without managing clusters or servers.

Fargate is now available in the following regions: US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Northern California), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Mumbai), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Asia Pacific (Singapore), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia pacific (Tokyo), Canada (Central), EU (Frankfurt), EU (Ireland), and EU (London).

Pricing Changes

The recent price changes mean that Fargate users will see a total cost reduction of up to 50%. Fargate pricing per vCPU per second is being reduced by 20%, and pricing per GB of memory per second is being reduced by 65%. Depending on the ratio of CPU to memory that you’re allocating for your containers, you could see an overall price reduction of anywhere from 35% to 50%.

The following table shows the price reduction for each built-in launch configuration.

Fargate and HIPAA Compliance

AWS Fargate has achieved a number or certifications including SOC, PCI, ISO, MTCS, C5, and ENS High compliance certification. Amazon also offers a 99.99% SLA with the service.

Fargate, along with Elastic Container Service (ECS) are included under the AWS HIPAA Eligible Service List under Amazon’s HIPAA Business Associates Addendum (BAA). This means that organizations can store, transmit and/or process protected health information (PHI) in these services as long as they fulfill the cloud shared responsibility model. Healthcare organization’s that plan to use AWS services with PHI must sign Amazon’s BAA, and implement appropriate administrative policies and technical controls. The Dash Compliance Automation Platform automates HIPAA administrative policies and technical controls.

About Containers

Building applications based on containers is a growing trend [See Docker: What is a Container?]. Containers allow organization’s to virtualize operating systems and applications in a more minimal configuration then typical virtual machines (VMs).

Containers give teams the granularity to provision the exact amount of CPU and memory needed for an application. AWS Fargate lets teams focus on building containerized applications without worrying about the infrastructure. AWS users do not need to pay for instance resources that containerized workloads don’t use. If a sudden spike of traffic causes the application to require more resources teams still have the ability to rapidly scale your application out by adding more containers, or scale your application up by launching larger containers. Fargate is the latest AWS that allows organizations to simplify container orchestration and provisioning.